Attack of the killer tulips

One of my greatest joys of parenting has been watching my 2 1/2-year-old develop into quite the little badass. He’s not agressive at all, but extremely tough. Short of streaming blood or a serious head injury, he’ll shake off just about any bump or bruise. He dropped a Maglite on his toe the last week and spent half the day at Kaiser (I’m not quite ready to share that story yet … not my best parenting moment), and cried for only a minute or two — despite a toenail that still looks mangled.

Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the flowerbed …

So I was more than a bit surprised last week when he developed his first big phobia: Tulips.

It isn’t just that my son is afraid of flowers. He’s afraid of one of the least scary members of the plant kingdom. Rhododendrons I can understand. Certain kinds of orchids can be kind of creepy. But tulips?

Back before we had the kid, and I had time to garden, I planted tulip bulbs in our front yard flower bed. For 11 months of the year, it’s an ugly wasteland of dirt in front of our home. But for most of March and a little bit of April, our front yard looks like Martha Stewart’s house. (Or at least one of her servant’s quarters.)

When the first flowers popped out of the ground a couple of weeks ago, we noticed he had a lot of questions about them. When the first tulip bloomed, he started acting even more stangely, demanding that we take whatever car was parked furthest from the tulips. After several of them opened, he took to throwing his back against the front door of the house, like he was standing on a ledge — and then suddenly rushing in a crab-like sideways sprint toward the car, with his back facing the flower bed.

I can sympathize a bit, because he probably gets this trait from me. While I don’t have any flora phobias, I grew up with a pretty strong aversion to slugs, snails and caterpillars, and still have a mild fear of clowns. I’m assuming his fear is normal (please resist the urge to tell me my kid’s autistic again), and I’m glad to report he’s already becoming slightly less squeamish, sometimes agreeing to walk in the grass in front of the flowers. But it still seems like a really odd phobia.

Kelly has already covered the subject of scary movies and television shows here and here. What strange things have you or your children been afraid of?